


You Alone I Cared to Keep

by TheWaffleBat



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Iorek is a dad and I'll die on this hill, Missing Scene, Panserbjørne, Spoilers, and no one can stop me, but I'm Frankensteining the two canons together, purely because I haven't read the books in so long, slightly more tv than book canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21779362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWaffleBat/pseuds/TheWaffleBat
Summary: “Were you afraid?”“Yes,” Iorek said, because he did not lie and there was something of the bear about Lyra. Something that said she could see through lies almost as well as she told them even without the alethiometer at her hip. “I was afraid for you, and I am grateful that I did not need to be, and that you handled yourself very well. I was afraid you would be hurt, and I would be too late to protect you if you were. I was afraid I would have to wet my claws for you, and you would believe that I did not think you were strong enough to stand on your own.”Lyra swallowed - Iorek heard the click, the catch of breath in her throat. He nudged her again, and she lay down in the cradle of his paws, head pillowed on his arm. “I was afraid for you,” Iorek said, and poked his head over the top of the walls to keep watch. “And I mastered my fear as you did. Rest, Lyra - we have many more miles to go.”There are few people Iorek cares for. Lyra is one.
Relationships: Lyra Belacqua & Billy Costa, Lyra Belacqua & Iorek Byrnison
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64





	You Alone I Cared to Keep

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken, and slightly modified, from Edna St. Vincent Millay's _Song of a Second April_.

The boy Lyra pulled from the storehouse, clutching a dried fish in his mittened hand almost as tightly as Lyra clutched him, smelled like sea ice and cold and woodsmoke, and metal and chemicals that itched and burned Iorek’s nose. He smelled like a cub, barely old enough to leave the den, and when his dull, glassy eyes met Iorek’s they did not spark as Lyra’s did, bright with interest for him and the Panserbjorne like him. He did not take a step back away from Iorek’s heavy paws and crushing jaws, and the long claws and teeth that lined them; he did not step closer, enchanted by a real live bear before him as Lyra had been, fascinated by the feel of his fur under her hands when Lee helped her to Iorek’s shoulders.

He smelled like fear, sour and clinging but old, very old. The clothes underneath his puffy coat was soaked with it, drowned in it, but the boy himself was no longer afraid. Iorek didn’t need Pantalaimon, an ermine barely longer than his toes, to clamber up to his ear and waste words saying it - he knew the boy no longer had a soul to feel fear with. The docile cub’s glassy eyes said it well enough.

The whole village stank of it, stank of fear. Cloying and sickly against the back of his throat, ground down into the cobblestones and ice and the wood of the huts like dirt, lingering like rot in the houses huddled against the dark, against the shadows cast dark over the village by the looming cliffs at its back. Curtains drawn and doors locked tight, outside only when they needed to be like it had been at Trollesund - terror of the Child Cutters in every shadowed corner, and pretending that they were not afraid as if admitting it made fear a weakness, rather than common sense.

“Come on, Billy,” Said Lyra, softly; her voice warbling with a horror she couldn’t quite swallow, the wide whites of her dark eyes bright with lingering terror, and using her hold on his hand to pull him around things that would trip him when he didn’t seem able to do it by himself. “This is my friend Iorek - a Panserbjorne. He’s going to help us get home to the Gyptians, to Ma Costa and Fader Coram and Lord Faa.”

The boy blinked at Iorek, looked to Pantalaimon perched on Lyra’s shoulder with something almost like longing, and when Lyra called what little focus he had to her she reached out for Iorek, and Iorek allowed the touch to his head. Let the two of them rest their hands on his fur.

Such a little paw for a little cub, on the wide breadth of Iorek’s head. Resting as dull weight, barely aware of the world around him. A little cub taken from his mother so young, the horrors he’d gone through so great; Iorek wouldn’t deny him, even if his skin prickled at the touch. Even if there was no soul for the boy to feel comforted by petting him with.

Carefully, Iorek lay down on the snowy cobblestoned street and stretched out his foreleg to help them climb up onto his back. The boy gripped weakly, still clutching his fish, and when Iorek stood it was only Lyra, sat behind him, who stopped him falling. With both safe on his shoulders Iorek was glad to put his back to the little village, and race across the snow back to safety. It was no place for Billy Costa.

It was no place for Lyra, hiding her breath hitching in sorrow behind her sleeve.

But Billy Costa was as weak as Lyra was strong, and they were both getting weaker as the night wore on, the clouds dark across the moon, wind screaming across the endless, empty snowfields; Lyra’s grip slipping, Pan whispering urgently in her ear to keep her awake, the boy barely upright at all, pale and wan beneath the brown of his skin. Iorek could last days travelling across the wide sweep of the icy snowfields, nose pointed to the only camp for miles glittering soft as stars on a distant hilltop; they could not.

That didn’t stop Lyra from complaining when he stopped, tipped them gently from his back, and scratched at the snow, digging a small hollow. “What are you _ doing_?” She demanded, picking Billy up from where he’d fallen, and jerked her head to the Gyptian camp. Her jaw was set - familiar stubbornness, now, after the weeks he’d travelled by her side. “We need to get him home!”

“We will,” Iorek said, and kept digging, dragging snow up the sides of the hollow and packing them into thick, strong walls. Lyra shivered as wind blew harsh across the snowfields, hissing across the ground. “But he is weak, and needs rest. He will not make it otherwise.”

“Well then shouldn’t we rush?” She said, and stared at Iorek’s digging paws, the snow he packed into taller and thicker and stronger walls. Anger dark in the furrows between her brows.

Such a fierce little thing, hair snarled around her head, clothes worn at the knees and elbows, eyes wild in her face. Iorek could fit her head inside his mouth, and crush it. His claws could tear through flesh and shatter bone - a single blow would kill her, he wouldn’t even have to try very hard - and the weight of his paw alone would kill her daemon; and she stood up to him, as she had at Trollesund. A cub any bear would be proud of, though Iorek suspected that humans hadn’t taken so kindly to her fierce soul, to stand so bold against him, tiny and weak and so very, very fragile.

He settled down in the hollow, and nudged Lyra and the boy inside with him, tucked safely into the curl of his body around them. “There were stories my mother told me in the den,” He told her, and the shelter he had dug warmed, the wind whispering over the top of the walls but not slipping inside. “Stories all bears are told, to teach us lessons that might save our lives. There was one about a bear who wished to become king. He was not the biggest bear, or the strongest, and his armour was not the toughest; but in battle he was undefeated.”

Lyra curled up mutinously, but she was listening - her eyes gleamed, greedy for the stories he could tell. “He was not the strongest,” Said Iorek, “But he was the fastest. He attacked in a rush, left mortal wounds before his enemy could even lift a paw, and it was with this strength in mind he challenged the king. But his greatest strength was his greatest weakness, too, and the king had not won his place by strength alone.”

“What happened?” Lyra asked; blandly, as if Iorek couldn’t feel her against his chest, feel her heart beating rabbit-fast against his ribs, feel her gone still and tense with delight. Pantalaimon curled up in the crook of her arm didn’t even bother to try hiding his eagerness.

“The king was cunning,” Iorek told them, and Billy Costa’s glassy eyes flicked to him, staring blankly. “He knew of the bear’s speed, so when they met in battle he did not try to fight back, or to match it. His armour was old, but as strong as the day he had forged it; the king trusted it. And was right to trust it, because while he stayed strong and fit, unharmed, the bear wore himself out, and when the king was ready a single blow felled him, and all bears learned the lesson; haste is wasteful. Better to be slower, and move steadily, than to rush. You will be stronger for it.”

Quietly, Lyra settled back against Iorek’s ribs, arms loosening, hands falling open in her lap. Pantalaimon nudged her fingers, and his dark eyes met Iorek’s, curled up miserably in her palms. “It just… doesn’t seem right,” He murmured, looking to Lyra’s face but whatever he was looking for behind the curtain of her hair, permission or anger or commiseration, Iorek didn’t know, and the daemon didn’t say, “To sit around while Ma Costa and Fader Coram and Lord Faa worries about us.”

“They will worry whether you are with them or not,” Said Iorek. It was a known truth about parents, human or bear - and it would always be true, because it always had been for as long as there had been men and bears to be parents. To fear for their children was a rare constant in a world that had little space for constants. “But you will do them no favours rushing home, and you will do Billy Costa harm. The boy is weak - this cold will kill him if we are not careful.”

Lyra ducked her head, hid deeper behind her hair. “There is no shame in rest, when you need it,” Iorek said, as gently as he could. His voice wasn’t made for gentleness - scraping out of his throat, raw and rough and rumbling deep inside his chest - but Lyra let her shoulders fall a little at the sound, let herself shake a little against Iorek’s shoulder. He nudged Lyra's knee, gathered her up into the cradle of his paws and settled her against his throat; rumbled deep in his chest, pleased, when she pressed her hand to his throat and felt the heartbeat within. “You were very brave,” He said, and Lyra ducked her head lower, Pantalaimon curling up tighter in her palm, “To go to the village. But you are a cub, and you need to rest. There is no shame in being taken care of, when you need it.”

Lyra stroked Pantalaimon's soft fur with her fingers, glanced at the boy mute by her side. “I didn't feel very brave,” She mumbled. “I was scared.”

“That is why you were brave,” Iorek told her, and Lyra stared at him like she'd expected to be scolded for her terror, like she was prepared to defend herself against it. The most human thing about her - perhaps the _ only _ human thing about her, that young girl who carried truth in her pocket and spoke to him with the honesty of bears - to think fear a weakness. “Anyone who tells you that they are never afraid is either lying or a fool. Fear has its place, it warned you of danger, but you did not allow it to control you. You mastered it.”

“Were you afraid?”

“Yes,” Iorek said, because he did not lie and there was something of the bear about Lyra. Something that said she could see through lies almost as well as she told them even without the alethiometer at her hip. “I was afraid for you, and I am grateful that I did not need to be, and that you handled yourself very well. I was afraid you would be hurt, and I would be too late to protect you if you were. I was afraid I would have to wet my claws for you, and you would believe that I did not think you were strong enough to stand on your own.”

Lyra swallowed - Iorek heard the click, the catch of breath in her throat. He nudged her again, and she lay down in the cradle of his paws, head pillowed on his arm. “I was afraid for you,” Iorek said, and poked his head over the top of the walls to keep watch. “And I mastered my fear as you did. Rest, Lyra - we have many more miles to go.”

They slept, safe and warm, while Iorek kept watch, and when he delivered them safely back to the Gyptain camp he crouched down for Fader Coram and Lee to help Lyra from his back, and sat with her while the boy was taken to his mother. Stayed by Lyra’s side, Lee with him; ears turned from Ma Costa’s grief and terror and sorrow, the words she whispered to her boy that had no soul. Was there with her when Costa’s cry rose to the cruel sky and merciless moon high above, and Lyra’s little hand gripped his fur too-tight, breath catching in her chest, wet eyes shining in the firelight, a cry of her own strangled and stillborn in her throat closed tight.

It was to Lee he left Lyra, when the body was brought out and a pyre built from scrap wood. She didn’t need Iorek for that, didn’t need his discomfort when the grief of others was bared so openly. She needed Lee, and the gentle soul he kept buried deep beneath his humour, to help her in this. Perhaps she even needed Ma Costa and Fader Coram and all the Gyptians who adored her, to share in her misery.

But she didn’t need Iorek, and when he met Lee’s eyes over her head Lee nodded, and Iorek left to patrol the snowfields. Lee would take care of her - it eased something tight in his heart that he would, and that Iorek didn’t need a bear’s sense for truth to know it. She would be safe with him, and if she were not then Iorek would make real the human stories of bears who felled armies on their own, and he didn't need his bear's sense of truth to know that, either.

**Author's Note:**

> It says a lot about me that Iorek Byrnison, an incredibly violent and powerful armoured bear, is one of my favourite characters. And because I love him, and the new tv series on the BBC, I decided to fall back into my favourite trope of "violent grumpy old man with a soft spot for his daughter".
> 
> Thinking of doing one for Lee and Ma Costa, too. I don't know yet, though; I'll see how this last episode pans out first. They better do it justice, and by justice I mean blood and gore and jaws hitting the floor.


End file.
